MREN and Advanced Applications

MREN supports multiple services and technologies related to large-scale, high performance e-Science applications, which have always been one of the primary drivers of next generation networking. These data, bandwidth and computationally intensive applications include those that utilizes computational environments, Grids, supercomputers, HPC clusters, science clouds, instrumentation, and analytic facilities - high energy physics, astrophysics, bioinformatics, computational biology, computational chemistry, data mining, high resolution visualization, digital engineering, geosciences, oceanographic and atmospheric studies, advanced digital media, computer science, computational science, including testbeds, medical imaging, and AL/ML/DP based applications.

High Energy Physics

Since its inception, MREN has been participated in cooperative initiatives with the worldwide high-energy physics research (HEP) community, which investigates complex topics related to the fundamental nature of matter, especially the attributes and behavior of the smallest elemental particles. These scientific investigations are undertaken by collaborative research communities worldwide that use highly sophisticated instrumentation to gather extremely large amounts of data, which then is distributed for analysis worldwide. MREN cooperates with the HEP communities to focuses on challenges related to generating, managing, transporting, and storing extremely large amounts of HEP data.

Primary HEP reference projects include the Large Hadron Collider the European Center for Nuclear Physics (CERN) Geneva, Switzerland, which generates more data than any other science project worldwide, over 200 Petabytes per year. This data is transported to compute sites worldwide, including primary sites (Tier 1) and secondary (Tier 2 and Tier 3), on two major international networks, the Large Hadron Collider Optical Private Network (LHCOPN) and the Large Hadron Collider Open Network Environment, which interconnected to MREN at the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility. MREN has supported the design, development, implementation and operation of these networks, including core nodes at the StarLight facility, which provides interconnections to local, state-wide, regional, national and international networks. Key partners for HEP initiatives include the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (a Tier 1 site) and the Argonne National Laboratory. MREN also supports several innovative LHC networking initiatives, such as grand challenge data moving planning for the forthcoming High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), developing a Network for the Transport of Experimental Data (NOTED) based on AI techniques, and developing a method for optimizing workflows with a packet marking technique (Scitags).

Astrophysics and Astronomy

MREN participates in several projects addressing infrastructure requirements of astrophysics and astronomy, especially high-performance networking, including capabilities for supporting specialized research instruments and techniques over international multi-domain research networks. For example, MREN is collaborating with the international networking research community to prepare for providing communication services for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will have radio telescope sites in Western Australia and South Africa and will generate more data that the LHC, which will have to be distributed worldwide.

MREN has also been assisting with networking services for the LSST, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is a large astronomical observatory in Chile designed to conduct a Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). With the largest digital camera built for astronomy, the observatory will survey the southern sky every few nights, creating a time-lapse record over ten years. The observatory has been implemented on a mountain in Chile and is interconnected by high-capacity international networks. MREN also has assisted in developing networking capabilities to support the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which produces 3D digital astronomical maps.

MREN has also supported an international collaboration established to develop a space geometric technique - very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which allows for precise measures of the motions of the Earth. VLBI measures the Earth's orientation by placing it within an inertial reference frame. VLBI is based on radio telescopes. By placing antennae in different locations around the globe, collecting radio waves from distant quasars, and measuring differences in arrival times (with picosecond precision), VLBI methods can measure various movements of the Earth. VLBI techniques require the gathering and distribution of large amounts of data.

BioInformatics

MREN has supported multiple BioInformatics projects, including one that created a Bioinformatics Software Defined Network Exchange (SDX) or BioSDX, which has been designed, deployed, and demonstrated by a multi-organizational research consortium to enable bioinformatics knowledge discovery supported by dynamic networking services. This BioSDX uses precision networking to support precision medicine. The BioSDX is based on recent technical developments in infrastructure abstraction that enable new tools and services utilizing programmable network infrastructure through high levels of resource virtualization. Combined with the close integration of programmable cloud computing facilities, the BioSDX prototype is an important advance in supporting the new paradigm of data-intensive bioinformatics across multiple disciplines, including computational genomics and precision medicine-those related to advanced medical imaging and high-performance optical networking.

Also, as a participant in the OptIPuter project, MREN supported the development of new techniques for supporting the BioInformatics Research Network project (BIRN), sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The OptIPuter project, led by Cal-IT2at UCSD and EVL at UIC, was a five-year, National Science Foundation-funded project interconnecting distributed storage, computing, and visualization resources using photonic networks. These techniques allow scientists generating multi-gigabyte data objects at diverse locations to locate, correlate, analyze, and visualize them.

Computational Genomics

MREN has been supporting several projects related to BioInformatics that are developing high-performance computational and communications infrastructure for Structural Genomics, including those supported by the Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC). This multi-petabyte science cloud serves the research community by co-locating a multidisciplinary data commons containing many TB of rapidly increasing scientific data with cloud-based computing, high-performance data transport services, virtual machine images, and shareable snapshots containing common data analysis pipelines and tools. The OSDC has been designed to provide a long-term persistent facility for scientific data and a platform for data-intensive science, allowing new types of data-intensive algorithms to be developed, tested, implemented, and used over large sets of heterogeneous scientific data.

Advanced Instruments and Facilities

MREN provides direct high performance access to dozens of advanced instruments facilities across the world, including synchrotrons, such as the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at ANL, a 7 Gev synchrotron, and the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL, and multiple supercomputing centers, including the DOE's Advanced Leadership Computing Centers, the National Center for Supercomputing Application, TACC, and NERSC.

Medical Imaging

MREN has supported multiple projects with various mediacl partnerships that have explored advanced mechanisms for digital media and imaging, including 3D imaging, AR, and VR for biomedical applications in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and national and international research and education networks. MREN has provided advanced networking capabilities to the annual RSNA conference in Chicago at the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority's McCormick Place, enabling the showcase of new medical imaging techniques. Mren has also supported professional associations broadcasts of surgical techniques.

GeoSciences

MREN has supported several projects focused on developing advanced optical networking techniques for supporting GeoSciences, which also requires utilizing large-scale, highly distributed 3D objects. One project for which techniques were developed is the NSF's EarthScope, which involves the acquisition, processing, and scientific interpretation of satellite-derived remote sensing, near-real-time environmental data, and active source data. Another project measured layers of the Earth's upper atmosphere. A related project developed techniques for oceanography.

Fusion Energy

With its research partners, MREN designed, implemented, and operated several international testbeds to model data flows related to fusion energy research based on tokamaks reactors, including the ITER (Latin for "the way"), the largest experimental fusion reactor currently in operation. A key goal of fusion reactor development is proving that fusion reactions can produce significantly more energy than that provided to initiate the reaction process, producing positive power. Tokamaks integrate heating processes, powerful magnets, and round reactor containers to spin charged particles and generate extremely hot plasmas to provide energy-releasing fusion reactions in extremely heat-intensive plasmas. Designing and operating tokamaks requires high-capacity, high-performance international networks.

Advanced Digital Media

MREN has supported multiple research and development projects in advanced digital media, especially for scientific visualization. High resolution digital media has become an important driver application for the next-generation networking technology design and creation. MREN and its research partners have been advancing digital media technology through multiple initiatives that are bringing capabilities supporting high quality, high performance digital media over wide area networks, including internationally.

MREN has undertaken projects related to multiple ultra-high resolution digital media modalities: 3D scientific visualization; digital-media-on-demand, interactive access to repositories of digital video and related digital objects, which can be directly streamed for immediate viewing or scheduled to be transferred at specified times; Digital media streaming, direct transfer, for live transfer of digital or streaming from archived video allowing for interactivity such as pause, forward, and reverse; digital media conferencing, multi-way interactive high quality video and audio for collaboration among multiple sites, along with supplemental capabilities for additional transmitted materials, such as projected 3D objects; and immersive virtual reality spaces projected over thousands of miles. In addition, MREN supports networking for the Amart Amplified Group Environment Scalable (SAGE) project at the Electronic Visualization Lab of the University of Illinois Chicago. Also, MREN established a research partnership with C-SPAN, enabling its channels to be multicast worldwide. This project has allowed C-SPAN to be multicast at high performance over national and international networks. One early project used a satellite to establish digital communications to the UoC's NSF Center for Astrophysics Research in Antarctica (CARA) to create the first interactive digital video conference to the South Pole.

Ultra Large Science Data Repositories and Transport

With multiple partners among eScience communities, MREN is investigating new methods of using advanced optical networks to support extremely large collections of digital information, especially transport among repositories for science communities. These research projects have examined innovative lightpath network architecture and techniques to support extremely high performance data streaming among multiple large-scale data repositories. These projects incorporate innovative Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs), deep buffer switches, high performance optical transport switches, smart NICs, and programmable networking techniques, such as SDN and P4.

Photonic Empowered Applications

MREN has also been exploring advanced networking infrastructure design and development projects directed at Photonic Empowered Applications-a new class of applications based on extremely high-performance optical communications. "Photonic-Empowered Applications" refers to multiple, global, next-generation applications designed and developed to utilize highly distributed facilities (including those based on resources at sites worldwide). These are resource-intensive applications - e.g., computationally intensive, bandwidth-intensive, storage system-intensive, etc. However, they are also distinguished by their utilization of advanced data communications based on dynamic multi-wavelength lightpath provisioning and supported by more flexible DWDM-based networking technology than that implemented in today's static point-to-point optical networks. These techniques can transport large amounts of data directly on lightpaths over global fabrics. These techniques are also optical network "aware" - that is, they can directly discover and signal for the use of the networking resources that they require, including signaling for the provisioning of lightpaths. In addition, some of these applications may be highly periodic and transient (e.g., they may exist only for a few moments at different times throughout a month or a day). Consequently, they may transition instantaneously from a state requiring little or no network utilization to one requiring enormous network resources for days, hours, minutes, moments, or even milliseconds. Many of these applications require close integration of core and edge resources. The boundaries between applications, computers, and networks truly dissolve within this emerging new infrastructure.

© 2025 MREN

09-12-2025